The New Yorker Radio Hour - Helen Rosner Ferments at Home, Plus Dexter Filkins on Saudi Arabia

Episode Date: December 4, 2018

One of the hot trends in the food world is one of the oldest: fermentation. No longer just for beer and sauerkraut, fermentation—which Helen Rosner calls “bacteria engaging with your food”—is the subject of cookbooks, and the specialty of destination restaurants like Noma, in Copenhagen, which has been called the world’s best restaurant for several years. René Redzepi, the chef at Noma, and David Zilber, the director of its fermentation lab, visited Rosner’s home kitchen to give her a lesson. A couple of weeks later, after the microbes had done their work, she brought some highly unusual fermented snacks to share with David Remnick. Plus, Dexter Filkins traces the rise to power of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. Long before the international furor over the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi—back when bin Salman was still being hailed as a reformer—Filkins says that he eliminated political opponents, cracked down on the press, extorted other wealthy royals, and arrested human-rights activists. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi continues to Royal Washington and much of the world. The president, for his part, stands firmly behind Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salomon. Donald Trump has claimed that we don't really know if bin Salman was implicated in the murder or not, dismissing the CIA's own conclusion. that he was. But the thrust of Trump's reasoning is that the Saudi government is, after all, our ally,

and it's just not our business, who they kill. It's also not good business. Earlier this year, Dexter Filkins published a long article in the magazine about bin Salman, how he had consolidated his power, how he was going to take power very soon, and his relationship with the Trump administration was also discussed,

and what Dexter found was extremely troubling. I talked with Dexter in April, and at that time, bin Salman was still being widely hailed as the great modernizer of Saudi Arabia. And he was making a huge impression on the world stage. As somebody put it to me, an American diplomat, we're used to, you know, when we get on the phone with the king of Saudi Arabia, he's 85 years old,

and he's kind of half asleep, and he mumbles a lot, and then the phone calls over. And this guy talks, you know, he's engaged. He's 32 years old. He's 32 years old. He's ambitious. He's impage. He's charming. He's charismatic. He's tall. He's on the make.

So even as Crown Prince, MBS has been making some liberalizing moves. He's promised to overhaul the Saudi economy. He's lifted restrictions, including women driving. Is he offering real reform? Yes. But it's important to distinguish what kind of reforms. He definitely wants to open up the economy. There's a lot of economic reforms that he's he's initiated. He's trying to restrain the clergy. He's letting women drive. The one thing that's not on the table is political reform. This is all about saving the House of Saad. And maintaining power. So what is the economic predicament of Saudi Arabia?

It's pretty dire. We think of them as just magnificently wealthy. And they are. And they are. But they're burning cash at an extraordinary rate. And it's a vast welfare state where almost everything is subsidized from food to gasoline to education, to health care, housing. But what's happening is that the whole economy was built on the idea that oil would be about $100 a barrel. And so they're just basically burning through their

savings. And so as somebody put it to me in the story, it current trends in five to seven years, Saudi Arabia is broke. They're running out of money. Unless they do what? Because I don't expect that in five to seven years the petro economy will disappear. It won't disappear, but they're They can't sustain what they have. They don't export anything else. They import virtually everything else. So they've got to diversify. They've got to do something else.

Now, MBS has also talked about inspiring a Saudi entertainment industry. I don't normally think of Riyadh as kind of proto-Hollywood or New York or Paris in that way. It's amazing. He's doing it. Movie theaters, concerts, you know, with certain restraints. but he's doing it. Well, let's get into the darker side of what's happening. Where are the main areas?

So in addition to all these things that he's done, at the very same time, he's arrested human rights leaders. He's detained journalists. So there's not going to be freedom of speech? Absolutely not. I mean, that's just off the table. And in many ways, he's tougher than his predecessor. So he's clamping down on any kind of notice.

in a political reform at the same time. And then, of course, we have the famous now wave of arrests when he dragged in dozens of very wealthy Saudis, even some of his relatives. But he put them in that well-known prison, the Ritzkarl. Which was a very peculiar thing, no? Very peculiar. I mean, you know, it's a hotel for princes.

It's just not generally for princes under arrest. And maybe the main thing that happened at the Ritz-Carlton is that MBS forced any number of these people to give up either all of their assets or billions of dollars, tremendous amounts of assets, all in the name of anti-corruption. How is that done and toward what political end? Well, you know, some of these were the richest people in the world were suddenly locked up in the Ritz Carlton. And so as best we understand it, when they were sitting in their hotel rooms from which the doors had been removed and anything that could be used to harm themselves. They were interrogated and their financial documents were kind of laid out in front of them. And they negotiated and arrived at a figure.

And it usually, as I understand it wasn't the, it wasn't all of their money. It was some of it. So you're worth $2 billion. We get a billion. And so it was kind of agreed to. And then you signed that away. Everybody kind of shook hands. And then no one spoke about it when they came out.

They didn't want anything really bad to happen to them. Did anything bad happen to them? It looks like it. What happened? There's at least one person who died in custody. It looks like under pretty grim circumstances. But at the end of the day, MBS got $100 billion in the big shakedown. The Saudi government got $100 billion from it.

Wow. Your piece seems to imply that MBS has been making deals with the United States and the Trumps are pleased to be making these deals for two reasons. one for geopolitical reasons, and the other is for potentially for personal reasons. So this is more difficult to fare it out. Yes. Let's start with geopolitical. In the Obama administration attempted to create a kind of detain, or better to say, a balance of powers in the region by dealing with Iran, signing a nuclear deal,

dealing with it in all the complexity that you have to deal with Iran. Now you have the Trump administration which sees a pure friend in Saudi Arabia and a pure enemy in Iran. That's exactly what happened. I mean, the Trump administration came in and said this whole thing about sharing the neighborhood, which is what Obama said to the Saudis, share it. We're tearing that up. And we're going to go after Iran. And so, you know, the Iranians have essentially come to dominate as they see it, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, they're everywhere. They're on the march and we are going to roll them back.

And I heard that phrase many times talking to people in the Trump administration roll back the Iranians. And so in the past year, what have we seen? The Saudis and the Emirates essentially tried to overthrow the government in Qatar. They think Qatar is too close to Iran. They tried to essentially overthrow the government in Lebanon. And then they launched this enormous and very bloody bombing camp. in Yemen, intervening in the civil war there because they see the Iranians as essentially behind it. Which the United States assists in on the Saudi side. Yeah, I mean, the Obama White

House kind of held their nose and said, okay, we'll keep sending you the bombs to drop, but they really didn't like it. And the Trump administration said, just, you know, go to it. Dexter, you've explained the geopolitical reasons why the Trumps are going to be close to MBS and have been. there's also the personal aspect, the personal financial aspect to it. How would you break that down? Well, this is complicated, but both the Trump and the Kushner families have financial interests in the Middle East. So, Qatar, which is home to a key American airbase, is currently the target of a blockade. Probably not by coincidence, but you tell me, your reporting turned up evidence of a failed real estate deal between the Cutteries and the Kushner family.

what happened, and it seems to be a factor in the administration's attitude toward the blockade of Qatar? It's, yeah, again, all this is just remarkable. I'm shaking my head. The Kushner companies owns the big, the big high-rise. Six-six-six-six- Fifth Avenue. And with that as a mortgage of a billion dollars, more than a billion dollars, that's coming due soon. As I was told, by a very credible source in the financial industry, the Kushner companies in April 2017 came to the cutteries in the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan. Looking for cash. Looking for a billion dollars. They asked for a billion dollars. As one does.

They had a big plan to kind of renovate the building and kind of make it all work. And the cutteries, and they have a sovereign wealth fund with $300 billion in it. They have money to burn. They looked at the deal that Kushner had kind of laid out for them, Charles Kushner, Jared's father and said, you know, forget it. Thanks very much, but, but no thanks. Six weeks later, there's a blockade announced on Qatar. John Bolton's going to be National Security Advisor very soon. How do his priorities and records square with MBS? It's, this is going to be a very unpredictable period. I think John Bolton is on, I think he wrote an

op-ed for the New York Times a few years ago, essentially calling for preemptive strikes against Iran. That's just exactly the sort of thing that MBS is thinking. MBS compares the Iranian leadership to Hitler. Yes, this is, I mean, I had these conversations when I was in Riyadh. It's the Nazi ideology. And they do not merely want to dominate the Gulf. They want to destroy Saudi Arabia and conquer Saudi Arabia. and we are, it's no more Mr. Nice guy.

And so instead of what you had, I think, in the Obama administration, was they were essentially restraining the Saudis from getting into some kind of serious, maybe a shooting match with the Iranians in the Gulf. Now it's a completely different ballgame. Dexter, thank you so much. Thank you, David. Dexter Filkins is a staff writer with the New Yorker, and we spoke back in New York. April. Both Dexter and Robin Wright have written a great deal about Jamal Khashoggi's killing and its repercussions, and you can find that at New Yorker.com. Helen Rosner is a food correspondent for the New Yorker, not a restaurant critic. She writes about the culture of food,

what people are eating, why they're eating it, why it all matters. She's always trying new stuff, and recently she experimented with fermentation, and she did so under the guidance of quite an authority on the subject, the celebrity chef, Renee Redzeppe. Helen and I, I heard you had an important visitor at your place recently. Tell me about it. What happened? What went on? I did. I made a number of recipes from a new cookbook. The book is called the Noma Guide to Fermentation, and it's by Renee Rizepi, the chef at Noma, and David Zilber, who's the head of the Noma Fermentation Lab. So Renee came over with David Zilbert. They showed up at 10 a.m. on a beautiful Sunday morning.

This is a nice place. Thank you. I'm not used to coming to New York and seeing people live in real homes. So Noma's a really big deal and it's in Copenhagen, right? Yeah, it's a really big deal. It's generally considered one of the best, if not the best, restaurant in the entire world. It's one of those high-end tasting menu kind of places

where you pay several hundred dollars to sit down for several hours with a number of courses that are weird and wild and wonderful. Weird and wild and wonderful how? What do I get when I go to know? Well, at Noma. For my hundreds of dollars. Noma is particularly famous for kind of being the locus of what has come to be known as the sense of place movement in high-end dining. So the chef, Rene Rizepi, has really turned to the landscape of Denmark and Scandinavia to find interesting ingredients and use interesting and unexpected techniques on them.

He does a lot of foraging. He does a lot of getting to know the earth and the soil and the seas. And then taking what he finds there, often things. that you might not expect to see on a menu, like ants, for example. Ants. Ants. For hundreds of dollars for dinner. Sure.

A recent dessert at Noma was a puree of blueberries and walnuts that was beautifully plated and garnished with a few perfectly placed ants. So Renee Rizzebi gets interested in experiments and experimental ways of cooking food or presenting it in somewhere another. Fermentation is something that I kind of think of when I think of, I don't know, Sourcrow? It's not a word that leaps to mind with delicious, though, necessarily. Obviously, I'm 100% wrong.

Well, I don't like to say you're 100% wrong. But sourcrout is not the sexiest food. But at the same time, you know, it's undeniably wonderful, right? It's tart and it's effervescent and it's sour and it's complex. But what happens at Noma, a number of years ago, Renee and his team decided that fermentation was actually at the core of everything that they were doing. And they built what is sort of lovingly known as the Noma Science Bunker or the Noma Fermentation Lab.

So explain what fermentation is exactly. What is, chemically speaking, what is it? So chemically speaking fermentation is the process of bacteria engaging with your food. Bacterias and yeast, they sort of, I need it. That sounds yummier all the time. Yeah. That sounds yummier all the time. But it's fermentation is the chemical breakdown of a substance by bacteria.

Ease, other microorganisms. I think I got that, right? Yes, you nailed that much better than I did. Because I wrote it on the back of my hand. I know. I should have read it in yogurt. You get it in beer. You get it in cheese. Even the much dread, although I'm sure many of our listeners, love kombucha. Sure. Yeah. That, that, God knows why. Frizzy, sour, weird flavor that's in all of these foods that we love and that we really respond to. Though, of course, there are some people who really don't like that flavor, but they'll grow into it. David had actually mailed me a couple of days ahead of time from Copenhagen, a mysterious package that I was instructed to put into the refrigerator right away. And this mysterious package contained what turned out to be barley Koji. If you've ever been to a cheap college dorm room and wandered into the bathroom and noticed the ceiling covered in black mold, you've met a relative of Koji.

So Koji is an interesting thing. It sort of looks like brown slime. And while Renee and I were the ones really getting our hands dirty, making these three fermented things, David was standing by ready to answer in incredible detail every single question that I had. Beyond Coddy's ability to break starches into sugars, it can also break proteins into amino acids, creating the flavor of umami. And that's where it comes into play and products like sauce. He's kind of like a mad scientist of fermentation. He knows everything. What's it like having these two guys in your kitchen? It must be a little on the intimidating. I was a little bit star-struck. I'm not going to lie. You know, they're really good at what they do, which was the great thing, and I felt very at ease with them. And the thing that really blew me away through all of it was how simple all three of these recipes were. All you do is mix these things with salt or with Koji, and you wait.

And something unusual and fascinating and terrific comes out of it. Exactly. You know, fermentation is in all sorts of foods that we already eat, but if you decide to really set out to do it yourself at home with seriousness the way this person is, book wants you to. It involves all sorts of specialized ingredients. So you become a person who winds up buying mold on the internet or going in search of a specialty bacteria when you travel overseas. And actually, René Rizepi told us an incredible story about a time he was trying to travel home from Mexico with a really exciting fermentation ingredient. They unpack my bags and within five minutes there's like 15 machine guns around me, really. And you know what? They opened one of the bags.

And they put the finger in like you see in the movie and they were like this. They taste it. I think they thought it was drugs. And I told them it's mold. It's mold. And then when it was sweet, you know, they all laughed. How do you get it? Do you scrape it off a wall?

No, you get it as a powder. Okay. Yeah, you can have these powdered up. But I guess you could scrape it off a wall. So you can't get this stuff even at Whole Foods. Most Japanese supermarkets will have Koji available. And if you don't have a Japanese supermarket near you, you can order it online. I had the good fortune of having Noma's own homegrown barley goji.

But making the hazelnut miso couldn't have been more simple. So I make hazelnut miso how? Here's how you do it. You take hazelnut flour. You combine it with a certain amount of the barley cogi. You add a little bit of salt. You pack it into a jar and you wait. And then I have it.

You have hazelnut miso. So after they left, you were left in charge of checking in with all this fermentation that was going on in your refrigerator, the blueberries. the hazelnut miso, and even some mushrooms. Yeah, then I recorded an audio diary of what I found. We have different lives. All right, it's day three, because I forgot to do this yesterday. And I'm going to check on our three jars. So first up, we have the blueberries, and wow, there is some serious blueberry juice

starting to form at the bottom of this jar. Hello, here we are on day four, I guess. Okay, I kind of want to give this a shake or something. but I don't want to mess anything up. It's clear that they're starting. Hey, what's wrong, sweetheart? Can I talk to my phone? Give me one second.

Well, here we are on the ninth day. Well, the blueberries and the mushrooms have now been going for a little bit over a week, which means it's time to test them. So I'm going to open the jar and give them a taste, and I'll report back. Now, Helen Rossner, we come to the crucial moment. Apparently, you've bought stuff. to eat. I did. I brought snacks. Can I say, guess should always bring snacks. It's just the right thing to do. What do you got? So the first thing is I brought you some, some yogurt and honey,

so we can make a little mini parfei with the blueberries. All right. I think I've done right there. Okay. And put regular old honey in it. Yeah, just plain old honey. It's the upside down little bear guy. Yeah. Okay. You're not joining me? Come on, Helen. I'll have a little. All right. Can you pass me a spoon? Damn right. I will. Okay. Let's try this out. Like that. That is weird, oh, but great. Yeah, that's my favorite of the three.

That's fantastic. I'm a huge fan of that. And the thing that really blows my mind with this whole process. Can I have more? It's like it's created a whole new berry. I mean, they're blueberry adjacent now. Right. Really good.

Okay, and what would you do with this? Like pancakes or... Yeah, you can do all sorts of things. You know, in the book, they recommend running them through a blender or a food processor and kind of puring them and, you know, because it's very... Yeah, I wouldn't have the patience for that. You've got the blueberries I'm eating them.

Well, once they're blended, they suggest really fascinating things, like using it in a homemade barbecue sauce or brushing an ear of corn with it and then grilling the corn. Well, whoa, whoa, whoa. Fermented blueberry ground up in a food processor

and smeared over a ear of corn. Sure. Man, I wouldn't have thought of that. First, this is the mushroom. Should I open it? If you want to, yeah, take a whiff, too. Take a whiff, she says. It smells like something very specific to me,

and I'm curious if it smells like the same thing to you. Oh, it smells kind of boozy. Yeah. Bozy mushrooms. What could be bad? I think it smells like apple cider. There's something very cidery to me. You got it.

Well, let's try what I made. Okay, now we have green beans. This is a preparatist. This is, you know, food TV style I came in with the final thing. I really should not have eaten lunch before this, but. Well, so I'm giving you the. and sort of reverse order of how much I like them. Fantastic advertising.

These are green beans that have what on them? The dressing is made out of a combination of the fermentation liquid from the mushrooms, so this mushroomy, salty brine, and then an oil that I made by infusing non-fermented mushrooms in a neutral oil and a little bit of diced chalet. Okay, this is delicious, I think largely because you cook these beans, they're crispy and they're fantastic. Oh, this is cold, this is really good.

Yeah. And we're going to crunchy bean town, too. Oh, God. You know. Right, now you have a package, a container of what looks like cookies. When I started mixing the Koji in with the hazelnut meal, I noticed that it felt a lot like cookie dough. And I asked Renee if you could just make cookies out of the hazelnut miso itself.

And to my incredible delight, he thought it was kind of a cool idea and suggested that he and David should play around with it when they get back to the Noma kitchen. make a miso cookie. You know what? Have we ever done that? Meso cookies. Yeah? Have we ever just put an egg in this and tried to bake it? No. Oh, yeah. Live NOAA innovation happening in my home right now. That's not a bad idea. Yeah. Magic just happened. This is what we want to. Um, you like it. You really like it. You're really good. So my wife and I have the same affliction. We're one of those people who are all.

always asking the waiter or for salt. This is the saltiest cookie I've ever had. Therefore, one of the best. I am delighted and surprised that you like this. I think... I've never tasted anything like this. This was fantastic. Now, is this going to become part of your cooking regimen, fermentation? Yeah, you know, it already was. It turned out. I'm a big fan of making things like preserve lemons, and I have definitely once or twice experimented with making my own kombucha. Be truthful with me. last hour on earth and you've got the best kombucha possible over on your left and the best beer possible over on your right. What are you reaching for? Well, beer is also fermented. Yeah, I know. So much better. It depends on the beer and it depends on the kombucha. I'm not good at answering

these questions. You know what this leaves us with our next segment down the road? How about that? We'll do a kombucha versus beer taste test. Ladies and gentlemen, Ellen Rosner. Thanks so much. Thank you. want to try making those fermented hazelnut flour cookies, well, we've got the recipe at New Yorker Radio.org and best of luck. That's our show for today, and I want to thank you for joining us, and I hope you'll join us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. Our team includes Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario,

Karen Frillman, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, Sarah Nix, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Emily Mann and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.